Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update10:11:42 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, Soviet officials were vilified for hiding the impacts from the public.
But when Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident took place last March, public officials in Japan and Canada alike jumped straight into Chernobyl-style damage-control mode, dismissing any worries about impacts.
Three years after residents first noticed something wrong with their drinking-water wells, tanker trucks still rumble daily through this northeastern Pennsylvania village where methane gas courses through the aquifer and homeowners can light their water on fire.
One of the trucks stops at Ron and Jean Carter's home and refills a 550-gallon plastic "water buffalo" container that supplies the couple with water for bathing, cleaning clothes and washing dishes. A loud hissing noise emanates from the vent stack that was connected to the Carters' water well to prevent an explosion -- an indication, they say, the well is still laced with dangerous levels of methane.
Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.
A Houston-based natural gas and oil drilling contractor pleaded guilty Tuesday to a negligent violation of the Clean Water Act in federal court in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
In entering the plea, Integrated Production Services has agreed to pay a $140,000 criminal fine and to make a community service payment of $22,000 to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation for ecological studies and remediation of Boggy Creek, located in eastern Oklahoma.
Severe seasonal melting has reduced ice floes, floating chunk of ice, in the Arctic Ocean to the thinnest on record, according to researchers.
Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany said the proportion of old, thick sea ice in the central arctic has declined significantly. The ice cover now "largely consists of thin, 1-year-old floes," they said, revealing measurements obtained from the "TransArc" project that aimed to track changes in water, air and ice across the polar sea.
More than 250 doctors across New York state wrote to Gov. Andrew Cuomo Wednesday, expressing their concern that there is no study on the long-term effects of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on human health included in the DEC's environmental impact statement.
"The SGEIS certainly mentions many of the toxic chemicals employed in hydraulic fracking," said Adam Law, a physician specializing in endocrinology and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College. "But there is no attempt to evaluate the kinds of health consequences that have already been observed in affected communities in those states where hydraulic fracturing is taking place."
The debate over natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking -- the process of injecting huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up rock formations and release gas for harvesting -- appeared to enter a new phase last week.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar hinted at the formation of new federal guidelines to govern the practice on public lands -- including rules requiring gas companies to disclose the chemicals they use for fracking.
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